Kennedy-Spaien, Dot Com

I’ve dabbled in hosting forums before. I used to administer a forum on Apnea at my old apnea blog. It was a self-hosted phpbb affair and it was really rather dismal and best forgotten.

Forum administration is a lot of work, even without a ton of subscribers. With 2005 era phpbb and limited knowledge of tweaking code, managing comment spam was horrible!

So for a few months, it has been clear that HHX should consider adding a forum to help build a sense of community. Talking with people like Justin Kownacki about hosted options like Virb, Miggle, MyNow, Catastrospace, Ning, etc, I settled on FaceBook. Christopher Penn has a forum over there for the Financial Aid Podcast, so I figured why not give it a spin?

(Bonus points: how many social media sites from that paragraph actually exist?)

So, please check out the forum located at HHX: The Health Hacks Podcast Group.

That is all.

Michael Bailey of MobaSoft is a great guy. I first met him at PodCamp Boston where he was networking and promoting his service MobaTalk (formerly MyChingo).

MyChingo is a voice commenting system for blogs, kind of like a public VOIP answering machine for your site. The name came from CHAT+LINGO. As it turns out, that name is strikingly similar to something very naughty indeed in Spanish. To fix that, as of later this year (when video support is added) the new name will be MobaTalk.

In the world of blog comments, audio is a great feature. I have tried using a dedicated phone line on some of our GNMHealth shows and I have also used MyChingo. What I have discovered is that the audiences for our shows don’t like sending audio comments as much as we enjoy getting them. Or even at all. In ANY format.

I see a lot of the people in the New Media Twitter circles sporting the MyChingo player on their sites, all filled up with comments. So it seems that perhaps it is a matter of demographics. Assuming that is the case, this blog may be a good place to try it again, as the audience here is quite different from the show sites I run.

I’ll be putting it up within the next week, and once it is in place, I’ve put the MobaTalk player up in the sidebar, so please feel free to drop me a line! In the mean time:
A) Have you used the MyChingo commenting system? How has it worked for you?
B) If you haven’t tried it yet, give it a whirl and let me know what you think of it.

Although Seth Godin is quoted so often these days, it is not because he is the flavor of the month - it is because the man is bloody brilliant at seeing the hidden obvious and summarizing it with great clarity.

So here’s today’s Really Good Seth Godin Quote™:

Media rule of thumb: if people wouldn’t miss your ads/ content/ noise if it went away, you should find something else to sell to advertisers. Not because it is ethically wrong to annoy people just because you can, but because in a world with a bazillion channels, people will just ignore you if they choose to.

For the record it IS ethically wrong to annoy people just because you can.

Do you read Seth’s Blog? Even if you are NOT a marketer, I recommend it!

“Extending the conversation” is what New Media is all about. We should be doing everything possible to facilitate this. There are interesting things being said that you may be missing! The fix is a two way street for bloggers and blog readers.

Bloggers: Do you have a comments feed? If not, get one, pronto. On WordPress it is as simple as putting up a link to:
www.yourdomain.com/yourblogdirectory/comments/feed/. You can even burn it at feedburner!

A caveat:
Chris Brogan has a WordPress blog at www.chrisbrogan.com, BUT if you really look at it, he’s using an URL redirect to:
www.grasshopperfactory.com/cbc/.
Don’t try to use the vanity address to hack this. Instead use:
http://www.grasshopperfactory.com/cbc/comments/feed/

For other blog platforms, you’re on your own, but it can’t be that hard.

Blog readers: Look for comment feeds and add them to your feed reader of choice (I still prefer Bloglines over the more newfangled Pageflakes or Google Reader). If you can’t find a comment feed listed and the site in question has the text “Powered by WordPress” in the footer, you can subscribe using the above-mentioned URL formula anyway.

So, let’s ALL extend the conversation!

So I didn’t make it to PodCamp NY ‘07. While I wish it would’ve been possible to go, at least I can take solace in the fact that I am in good company: Justin “Rob Sharp” Kownacki didn’t make it. Neither did Barack Obama, for that matter!

While it would have been a great networking experience, and I would get to see The Mayor (Who lives 10 minutes from me!) and Whitney Hoffman plus all kinds of new friends, I did get some networking in via Twitter.

With an event that big, if you add yourself to the event twitter group, people just seem to assume you are there! I scored a few new twitterfolken, including jMoonah of Uncle Seth (we met fleetingly at PodCamp Boston ‘06) and Tiil who is working on a new video aggregation channel.

On the flip side:

Since Ben Yoskovitz has sadly left Grasshopper New Media, Whitney, Megin Hatch and I have been doing some talking about exciting new directions to take our various properties (together in one way or another, I’m pleased to say). It will be a lot of fun to boldly forge a new path for all our great shows and blogs!

I’ve also decided to outsource my record label’s retail fulfillment operations to CDBABY, which will free up a lot more time at the Kennedy-Spaien homestead!

Working on my taxes, it seems that for the first time, Disc of Light is operating at a profit! Woot! Well, except for paying the taxes on that profit, but hey… what are you gonna do?

Other things I’m grateful for are that we’re 2 episodes in to a great new show - Yoga: It’s a Gas! and that Michelle at Healthy Helpings TV has managed to recover from a broken camera only missing one week!

So, in retrospect “Takin’ Care of Business” was probably the better choice for me this time around, but I really hope to make PodCamp Pittsburgh ‘07 (If they can set a date, already!) and wild horses won’t keep me away from PodCamp Boston ‘07. I hope to do VON Boston as well!

If I don’t see you there, add me as a Twitter Friend!

This week, we’ve lifted the curtain on our newest show, Yoga: It’s a Gas! with a sneak preview of a rough edit of episode one posted at the Health Hacks Podcast site.

We are having an embarrassing issue with screen geometry that we can’t seem to lick, though. If any kind soul has any advice for us on how to fix this issue in Final Cut Pro, please contact me!

See the issue: YiaG

Please, please drop me a line via the contact page at that site.

A long time ago, I soured on “hosted solutions” such as Blogger/Blogspot blogs and the like. I have had content just go away magically, and that is a sad thing!

Working with Grasshopper New Media, especially in the earliest days, was all about leveraging other people’s bandwidth. Chris Brogan had us using free dropboxen, PBWiki, free groupware, etc. Chris has a great nose for trying out and adopting new services.

I’ve come around a bit thanks to this influence, chiefly because Chris changed my email account over to Gmail for Domains last fall. That actually worked out incredibly well.

So now, I try to leverage all kinds of services where appropriate… Blip.TV, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, FeedBurner, etc, etc. I suppose one advantage of using so many different (yet somewhat redundant) services is that if content disappears from one, it is still available somewhere else.

One thing I have been holding off on is implementing a GNMHealth wiki. I did set one up at PBWiki for the Health Hacks Podcast, but it isn’t in use.

So I’m now thinking about trying Ning. They offer complete social suites with forums, wiki, photo sharing, etc. You can have your own little MySpace! It seems big, though, and not to be taken on casually. Do I really want to monitor forums, for instance? Is there enough of an audience for the shows yet to support an online community? I just don’t know.

I would be interested to hear your perspectives on Ning, though. Have you seen it? If not, why not have a look.

UPDATE:

Justin Kownacki just Twittered about this same dilemma. Somehow a simple answer came to me when HE asked: It depends on the size and dedication of your audience. Ergo: No, GNMHealth is NOT ready yet.

Sometimes, I must confess I feel out of step with the listenership at some of the projects that I produce. A case in point is the Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show.

The host of that show, Jimmy Moore, is a great guy who I get along well with. He started his blog around the time I started my first blog, and because our interests overlap, we’ve been good friends ever since.

Now Jimmy comes from a fairly conservative perspective and I, well I guess you could call me a “Massachusetts Liberal” whatever that means. I have a long history of friendships and working relationships with people whose views differ from mine, and I have long since learned not to let let differences of opinion get in the way of a great working relationship.

Since Jimmy has been working with me on the podcast, several times I have had to bite my lip when he says things with which I don’t necessarily agree. And that’s OK, because it’s Jimmy’s show, and no matter where he goes, you can bet it will be entertaining.

Last week Jimmy did an episode that has been very controversial, to say the least. The topic was Veganism/PETA and Jimmy came down rather hard on them and invoked a lot of religious overtones. Getting into religion in what seems — on the surface — to be a religion-free context strikes me as an odd choice, but whatever… that’s his prerogative.

When I first heard the raw audio, I was quite certain there would be an outcry, and I was not wrong. The people Jimmy was criticizing (some have said “demonizing”) were not pleased to say the least, and at last I was compelled to issue an editorial refusing to fire Jimmy.

Now via comments and email, I have received wave upon wave of Kudos from Jimmy’s listers, but this has unsettled me even more. While many were kind and merely thanked me for sticking by their favorite podcaster, some were more dark and even trollish. A recent comment from a listener: “Vgeanism [sic] is a mental disorder, just like liberalism.”

I am flabbergasted at how much people have emotionally invested in their dietary choices. When they start getting politics and religion tied into these issues, it can get downright scary. The commonality between diet, politics and religion is that they all seem to relate on some level to a person’s sense of self-identity and therefore self-esteem.

One person said that Jimmy’s comment about eating animals being OK because they “would never have an everlasting life in Christ” could be interpreted as suggesting that eating Jews is OK, too. I hope that was tongue in cheek!

The gist of this is - am I too out of touch with Jimmy’s listeners to be an effective producer? On the one hand, I feel that I’m a fine editor and my skills are up to snuff, but on the other hand, is that enough? Can I really be effective in serving these people’s needs if my head is in such a different place from theirs?

Ultimately, though, I want to believe that a show on dietary choices can be produced appropriately even by a simple Unitarian-raised, secular humanist, left-of-center geek like me.

Can’t we all just get along, people?